Lidia Vianu -
Director of CTITC (CENTRE FOR THE TRANSLATION AND
INTERPRETATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY TEXT), Bucharest University,
Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the English
Department of Bucharest University, Member of the Writers’ Union, Romania.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian
author, poet, critic, feminist and social
campaigner. She is among the most-honored
authors of fiction in recent history; she is a
winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince
of Asturias award for Literature, has been
shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times,
winning once, and has been a finalist for the
Governor General's Award seven times, winning
twice. While she may be best known for her work
as a novelist, she is also an award winning
poet, having published 15 books of poetry to
date. Atwood has also published short stories in
Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC
Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, Playboy, and
many other magazines.

Doubled, I walk the street. Though we
are no longer in the Commanders'
compound, there are large houses here
also. In front of one of them a Guardian
is mowing the lawn. The lawns are tidy,
the facades are gracious, in good
repair; they're like the beautiful
pictures they used to print in the
magazines about homes and gardens and
interior decoration. There is the same
absence of people, the same air of being
asleep. The street is almost like a
museum, or a street in a model town
constructed to show the way people used
to live. As in those pictures, those
museums, those model towns, there are no
children. This is the heart of Gilead,
where the war cannot intrude except on
television. Where the edges are we
aren't sure, they vary, according to the
attacks and counterattacks; but this is
the center, where nothing moves. The
Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia,
knows no bounds. Gilead is within
you.Doctors lived here once, lawyers,
university professors. There are no
lawyers anymore, and the university is
closed. Luke and I used to walk
together, sometimes, along these
streets. We used to talk about buying a
house like one of these, an old big
house, fixing it up. We would have a
garden, swings for the Children. We
would have children. Although we knew it
wasn't too likely we could ever afford
it, it was something to talk about, a
game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems
almost weightless. We turn the corner
onto a main street, where there's more
traffic. Cars go by, black most of them,
some gray and brown. There are other
women with baskets, some in red, some in
the dull green of the Marthas, some in
the striped dresses, red and blue and
green and cheap and skimpy, that mark
the women of the poorer men. Econowives,
they're called. These women are not
divided into functions. They have to do
everything; if they can. Sometimes there
is a woman all in black, a widow. There
used to be more of them, but they seem
to be diminishing. You don't see the
Commanders' Wives on the sidewalks. Only
in cars.The sidewalks here are cement.
Like a child, I avoid stepping on the
cracks. I'm remembering my feet on these
sidewalks, in the time before, and what
I used to wear on them. Sometimes it was
shoes for running, with cushioned soles
and breathing holes, and stars of
fluorescent fabric that reflected light
in the darkness. Though I never ran at
night; and in the daytime, only beside
well-frequented roads.Women were not
protected then.I remember the rules,
rules that were never spelled out but
that every woman knew: Don't open your
door to a stranger, even if he says he
is the police. Make him slide his ID
under the door. Don't stop on the road
to help a motorist pretending to be in
trouble. Keep the locks on and keep
going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to
look. Don't go into a laundromat, by
yourself, at night.